Years ago my wife and I used to go for long walks along the footpath by the local river but nowadays our walks are shorter. One such long walk would take us past an old disused brick and timber warehouse no larger than an ordinary house standing right on the river bank. This building had a sign at the front of it, facing the road over the adjacent river bridge, identifying the building as the premises of the former Arnold Motor Carriage Company, which built motor carriages based on the Benz design from 1896 to 1899. Only a dozen such vehicles were built before the Arnold family abandoned the project as they already had many other thriving business interests in the area. When we drove past the building in later years we saw that the sign had gone but the building was still in its disused state and was presumably listed because of its historical relevance, so could not be removed or modified without permission. Evidently over the years nobody had found a use for it.
By coincidence in the twentieth century when I bought my first car at a local garage the manager of the service department there was also a Mr Arnold and when I married five years later and bought a house I discovered that by yet another coincidence he lived two doors along from our house. His widow still does. However, he was in no way related to that nineteenth century Arnold family.
By yet another coincidence in the twenty-first century I took up corresponding with a Mr Arnold living in Virginia USA and he was actually the person whose correspondence first prompted me to start writing my strangely prescient novel. In the novel my principal character needed to be an engineer, or at least a mechanic, so I described him as being a motor mechanic working for a Mr Arnold in his garage by the river which specialised in servicing prestige and high performance cars. In particular I described my character as working on a Honda NSX, a real innovative three litre high performance sports car marketed from 1990, when he was approached to take a second job as the engineer on board the time capsule central to my story. The nineteenth century Mr Arnold had himself evidently been an enthusiastic driver and was the first person convicted of speeding in a motor vehicle in the UK when in January 1896 he drove a Benz at eight mph in an urban area and was chased down and arrested by a policeman on a bicycle. In fact later he sent the prototype of his own more powerful Arnold carriage to Ireland for testing to avoid any further such encounters with the law in England. I felt that my time warped association of the Arnold name and old premises with more modern high performance cars was entirely in keeping with the time distorting theme of my novel.
Recently the American Mr Arnold told me that his step-son was coming to the UK to complete a deal for a luxury executive jet for his employers and fly it back to the USA from an airfield near our home and that while here he wanted to meet us as his step-father had often talked about us, so we invited him to have Sunday lunch with us. This arrangement prompted me to recall that old building associated with the Arnold family name, so I checked what had happened to it in recent years and discovered to my surprise that it had been entirely restored and put to use as offices by a car dealership that dealt, in their own words, in “sports, prestige and luxury cars”. In other words they were exactly the type of company which could in earlier years have had a Honda NSX on their books!
A while after making this discovery I decided to check when this car dealership had started using that old building to see how long after I wrote my novel it had been. When I started up my laptop that morning over breakfast in bed I noticed that the current date was twenty-four four twenty-twenty-four, which appealed to my mathematical sense of patterns and numbers. In fact the date so written in words was equivalent to the musical composition form ABBAAB. Apart from that the date was also exactly halfway between my birthdays and when I pointed this out to me wife we both concluded that she ought to have given me half a birthday card to celebrate this half-occasion. Half a present would perhaps have been too much to expect, but the weird phenomenon at the heart of this site had another surprise for me. When I looked into the story of that car dealership I discovered that they took up residence in the old Arnold building in 2020. Given that I found this out on a date made up of only the words “twenty” and “four” it seemed very fitting that the latter date I discovered only contained the repeated word “twenty”, i.e. one half of the two words used in the date of my half-birthday. That then was my half-present in a convoluted fashion that that incredible manipulator of words and numbers, Charles Dodgson, the writer of Alice in Wonderland under the name Lewis Carroll, might have dreamed up. In that connection in my novel the assistant to the original designer of the time capsule was also named Lewis, a concealed reference to the word and number manipulating aspects of my own work. At this point I could also comment that when I wrote my novel my inspiration was evidently half present and half future while it is now half present and half past, but maybe I am just becoming overindulgent and half-witted.
The main discrepancy between the garage in my novel and the car dealership in later reality was that the real company did not service cars but apparently only bought and sold them, but the constraint on my principal character was that he needed to be a car mechanic rather than a salesman, so I had to deviate from the future reality in my fiction writing in this respect. It is nevertheless noteworthy that that old building remained disused for another nine years after I wrote my novel until a business adequately compatible with the one in the novel appeared to restore and occupy it.
I continue to be amazed that such coincidences involving the novel are still appearing and that so many facets of the story are already covered by them. If I had been a prolific fiction writer with many novels to my name then I might have accepted that over time I could have encountered such coincidences spread across those many documents but to find so many all focussed on just one document is . . . “profoundly serendipitous” barely covers my feeling about it but it must suffice.